Weeds Gone Wild

While we were gone my garden ran amok. You know that saying, while the cat's away.....

I have my own version: 

When the gardener goes away the weeds have their day!

One advantage of letting weeds grow for weeks is that they are very easy to see, and each weed takes up so much space, a bit of pulling opens the garden up amazingly fast.

Some many of my flowers are a bit leggy from competing with the weeds for sunlight.  I also have sunflowers that volunteered to grace the garden from a few I planted last year. For now, I have let them be. They bring a smile to my face. Even though it is rather late in the growing season, I bought a few of the remaining annuals at the garden shop to add a bit more color.

And then there are the Hollyhocks. I had three clumps that produced beautiful flowers last year. As they are biannual, they are gone. But they left their children - and oh, they were prolific! If I leave them be, next year I will have a garden that is a single mass of hollyhocks. Hmmm.... it might be interesting.